Now

Postdoc in the Structural Molecular Dynamics group at the University of Kassel. I am looking at how much energy it takes to pull an electron off a molecule, and how that changes when you add water molecules to it one at a time.

The calculations for the first paper are done. What is left is working out why the shift behaves the way it does at one particular cluster size, and whether the electron-density picture lines up with what the spectroscopy would actually see.

VAJRA, the coincidence acquisition system I specified for our spectrometer, runs on the lab hardware and records every day.

Right now I am dealing with markers. Our time-to-digital converter turns out to reject external marker signals at the device level, which took a lot of digging to prove, and then a conversation with the manufacturer. The fallback stamps the angle in software on the same timebase, so there is still only one codebase to maintain.

I am working my way down the stack. The exercise I set myself is to follow one photoelectron from the face of the detector to a row in an HDF5 file and name every layer it passes through, including the ones I currently take on faith: the converter silicon, memory-mapped I/O, DMA, the driver, the vendor library.

Next step is a register-level GPIO exercise on a dev board. So far I have only read about it.

German at A2, targeting B1 by Q4 2026. Daily practice rather than an exam sprint; the exam sprint version stalled.

Badminton, and running the trails along the Fulda.